By Eric H. Cline
Chair,
Department of Classical and Semitic Languages and Literatures
The George Washington
University
October 2009

Debates concerning David and Solomon have been at the forefront of
biblical archaeology for a long time, but especially since the early
1990s when their very existence was called into question. The problem
at the moment is that although the Tel Dan Stele—fragments of
which were discovered in 1993 and 1994—now presents us with the
first known, and earliest, extra-biblical textual attestation for the
House of David (Beit David), there is little other direct
textual or archaeological evidence available for either king at the
moment. Thus the debate continues to the present, despite—and
in some cases because of—the introduction of a variety of new
data.

The first inscribed fragment of the Tel Dan Stele was found in 1993
at the site of the same name, located in northern Israel near the
modern Lebanese border and the headwaters of the Jordan River. The
site has been continuously excavated since 1966 by teams led first by
Avraham Biran and now by David Ilan of the Hebrew Union
College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Jerusalem. The stele was
discovered just as the debate concerning whether David and Solomon
had ever existed was reaching an initial crescendo among scholars. At
a single blow, the finding of this inscription settled the question
of whether David was an actual historical person, at least in the
minds of most scholars.

Gila Cook, the expedition’s surveyor, discovered the first
fragment from the stele. She had gone out to the site one day in the
early afternoon and noticed that one of the rocks in a wall that had
recently been excavated had letters inscribed upon it. It seems that
the original inscription, which had been inscribed and erected at Tel
Dan in about 842 BCE, had later been taken down and broken into
fragments, some of which were eventually reused in the wall. It was
only because of the raking light of the afternoon sun that she could
see the inscribed letters, which had been missed by all previous
members of the excavation team, including the volunteers who had
excavated the wall of which the stone was now a part. Two more
fragments came to light the following summer, in 1994, and the three
fragments now form what is left of the Tel Dan Stele. It is possible
that more will be found in the future.

As it is currently reconstructed, the inscription describes the
defeat of both Joram, king of Israel, and Ahaziyahu, king of Judah,
by a king of Aram-Damascus in the ninth century BCE. It reads in
part:

Now the king of Israel entered formerly in the land in my father’s
land; [but] Hadad made me myself king, and Hadad went in front of me;
[and] I departed from [the] seven [ . . . ] of my kingdom; and I slew
seve[nty ki]ngs, who harnessed thou[sands of cha]riots and thousands
of horsemen. [And I killed Jo]ram, son of A[hab,] king of Israel, and
[I] killed [Ahazi]yahu, son of [Joram, kin]g of the House of David;
and I set [their towns into ruins ? . . . the ci]ties of their land
into de[solation ? . . . ] . . . other and to overturn all their
cities ? . . . and Jehu] [ru]led over Is[rael . . . ] siege upon [ .
. . ]

The finding of the inscription caused a major sensation and was
published on the front page of the New York Times and in Time
magazine. It continued to make news when Niels Peter Lemche, a
professor at the University of Copenhagen and one of a group of
scholars lumped together as “biblical minimalists” who
were at the forefront of the debate on David and Solomon’s
existence suggested that the inscription might be a forgery planted
by the excavator, Avraham Biran. However, Biran was one of the
oldest, most distinguished, and most trusted archaeologists working
in the state of Israel—he was William F. Albright’s first
PhD student at Johns Hopkins University and the longtime director of
the Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archaeology at the Hebrew Union
College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Jerusalem—and no
serious scholar doubted the authenticity of the fragments. Nor did
they question the interpretation of the inscription when other
minimalists suggested that byt dwd (Beit David) might not mean
the “House of David” but something else entirely (such as
the word dwd connected with the word “beloved,”
“uncle,” or “kettle”). Today, after much
further discussion in academic journals, it is accepted by most
archaeologists that the inscription is not only genuine but that the
reference is indeed to the House of David, thus representing the
first textual evidence found anywhere outside the Bible for the
biblical David. However, we are still lacking any contemporary or
nearly-contemporary inscriptions which mention Solomon; at the moment
we do not have a single one, although this situation could change
tomorrow, or next week, or next year (or never).

Moreover, there is still very little archaeological evidence for the
existence of David, as has been made clear during the debate about
biblical minimalism, especially with regard to David and the extent
of his empire. The debate eventually spread—perhaps not
surprisingly—to encompass the city of Jerusalem itself. By the
time of David, the city was already some two thousand years old, so
the specific archaeological argument concerned the size and wealth of
the tenth century BCE city in particular. While some scholars argued
that it was indeed a mighty capital city, as described by the Bible,
others believed that it was simply a small “cow town.” In
fact, it is still not clear where David is positioned along the
continuum from tribal chieftains to mighty kings and just how large
the city itself was during his time.

Temple Mount and City of David Aerial - photo BiblePlaces.com

During her excavations in Jerusalem after 1961, Kathleen Kenyon
discovered the remains of what archaeologists call the “Stepped
Stone Structure” in an area that is just outside the walls of
the Old City. This is sometimes thought to be part of the defensive
system erected by the Jebusites from whom David captured the city.
More recently, excavations by Eilat Mazar of the Shalem Center in
Jerusalem within this same area suggest that this Stepped Stone
Structure may be connected to a much larger building. Her excavations
have uncovered massive walls, which she identified as the remains of
a building that she called the “Large Stone Structure”
and which she said was part of a complex that included the Stepped
Stone Structure on the slope. She identifies this complex as the
palace of King David, in part because of its location and the date of
the associated pottery, which she regards as dating to the tenth
century BCE.

However, it is by no means clear whether this is actually David’s
palace. Although Mazar claims to have excavated a large building, it
is not yet definite that it is from the tenth century. And even if
it is from the tenth century, it is not certain whether it is from
the time of David. And even if it is from the time of David, it is
not unquestionably a palace. In fact, Israel Finkelstein and three
other archaeologists from Tel Aviv University argue that it is not.
Instead, they assert, on the basis of construction techniques and
structural differences, in addition to pottery and other finds, that
the walls unearthed by Mazar do not belong to a single building but
rather to several, and that the pottery and other remains indicate
that the Stepped Stone Structure represents at least two phases of
construction—with the lower part possibly dating to the ninth
century BCE and the upper part dating to the Hellenistic period. If
Mazar’s new building ends up not being associated with David,
then there is currently not a single structure in all of Israel which
may be definitely linked to his building program, if indeed he even
had one.

Palace of David Area, Large Stone Wall - photo BiblePlaces.com

Finkelstein has been a major player in recent discussions concerning
the precise dating of both artifacts and events purportedly dating to
the time of David and Solomon. Throughout the 1990s and into the new
millennium, Finkelstein proposed a re-dating of the traditional
chronology—which places the dates of the reigns of David and
Solomon in the tenth century BCE—and suggested instead that
much of the pottery and other materials that had been dated to the
tenth century and thus assigned to the time of David and Solomon
should in fact be assigned instead to the ninth century or later and
to other kings. In so doing, Finkelstein has had to deconstruct the
work of the most well-known archaeologist that Israel has ever
produced—Yigael Yadin.

Yadin, at various times during his career, was chief of staff of the
Israel Defense Forces, deputy prime minister in the government of
Menachem Begin, and a prominent archaeologist on the faculty of the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His excavations at several sites
uncovered archaeological remains which he attributed to Solomon; they
remain essentially the only sites to date which contain such remains
outside of Jerusalem. But, was Yadin correct?

Yadin’s first substantial excavations took place at Hazor,
located in the north of Israel. The British archaeologist John
Garstang had already dug there in 1928, but it was Yadin whose
excavations from 1955 to 1958 brought the site to life. Yadin’s
staff members were among the best available; many of his area
supervisors went on to become established professors of archaeology
or key figures in the Department of Antiquities. And, in one level at
Hazor, Yadin and his team located a six-chambered city gate and part
of a casemate wall (consisting of parallel inner and outer defensive
walls connected by internal constructions to create small rooms that
function both as part of the wall and as storage or living spaces),
which he attributed to Solomon.

After Hazor, Yadin moved on to excavate at Megiddo. Following on the
heels of Gottlieb Schumacher (1903–1905) and the University of
Chicago (1925–1939), Yadin headed the third expedition to the
site, which took place during a few brief seasons in the 1960s and
early 1970s. He used the Megiddo excavation to train his graduate
students, just as he had done earlier at Hazor. Moreover, he used the
excavations as a further opportunity to investigate his theories
about the authenticity of the biblical tradition. At Megiddo, Yadin
uncovered the ruins of buildings and other constructions, including a
palace. He identified the palace (which he called Palace 6000) on the
basis of its architectural plan as a “bit hilani”—a
Mesopotamian name for a specific type of palace more usually found in
northern Syria at the time of Solomon. He also believed that the
nearby city gate, with six chambers, had originally been attached to
a casemate wall, just like the gate and wall which he had found
earlier at Hazor.

Yadin dated the walls and gates at Megiddo and Hazor, as well as
Palace 6000 at Megiddo, to the time of Solomon in the tenth century
BCE. In large part this was because of one passage from the Bible—a
passage from 1 Kings that describes the building activities of
Solomon at the sites of Megiddo, Hazor, Gezer, and Jerusalem: “And
this is the account of the forced labor which King Solomon levied to
build the house of the Lord and his own house and the Millo and the
wall of Jerusalem and Hazor and Megiddo and Gezer” (1 Kings
9:15).

The University of Chicago archaeologists who had dug at Megiddo
previously had also thought they saw the handiwork of Solomon at
Megiddo, but in a different stratigraphical layer at the site—one
which lay immediately above the city that Yadin identified as
Solomon’s. The Chicago excavators identified several buildings
in this higher layer as stables, citing in particular another passage
in 1 Kings which describes “chariot cities” belonging to
Solomon: “And Solomon gathered together chariots and horsemen;
he had fourteen hundred chariots and twelve thousand horsemen, whom
he stationed in the chariot cities and with the king in Jerusalem”
(1 Kings 10:26).

The proper identification of these buildings has been the source of
much debate among archaeologists ever since they were first uncovered
by the Chicago excavators. While some agreed that these were stables,
others saw them as storehouses, barracks, marketplaces, or fulfilling
some other unidentified purpose. In 1998, the Tel Aviv University
expedition to Megiddo uncovered another “stable” at the
site and eventually settled the debate to most scholars’
satisfaction by identifying numerous features that circumstantially
point to stables as being the correct identification. Unfortunately
it is by no means clear that these stables were built by Solomon.
They could have been built by Omri, Ahab, Jeroboam II, or any one of
a number of other kings who lived and ruled in the Northern Kingdom
of Israel long after Solomon died.

Yadin also decided to see if there was a similar city gate at Gezer,
the final site mentioned in the biblical passage from 1 Kings 9:15.
Gezer had been excavated previously, from 1902 to 1905 and 1907 to
1909, by the Irish archaeologist Robert Alexander Stewart Macalister.
Yadin therefore began excavating through Macalister’s records
rather than through the actual dirt. And, he found what he was
looking for—a city gate strikingly similar to those at Megiddo
and Hazor. Macalister had found one half of it but had identified it
as a Maccabean fortress or palace, dating it to the second century
BCE and the revolt led by Judah “the Hammer” Maccabee.
Yadin believed that Macalister had misidentified this structure and
that rather than being a Maccabean fortress or palace, it was instead
half of a city gate, complete with side chambers just like those at
Megiddo and Hazor. However, the other half still remained to be
uncovered.

At the time of Yadin’s researches, in the 1960s, the Hebrew
Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Jerusalem together with
the Harvard Semitic Museum had already reopened the excavations at
Gezer. Yadin contacted the American archaeological team excavating
there and explained his theory to them. Sinking their picks and
trowels into the dirt, they quickly found the other half of the gate,
thereby confirming his hypothesis. As a result, Yadin was convinced
he had found evidence for a “blueprint” of Solomonic
activity at all three sites outside of Jerusalem associated with
Solomon in the Hebrew Bible—namely the gates and casemate walls
built at Megiddo, Hazor, and Gezer, as well as Palace 6000 (the “bit
hilani palace”) at Megiddo.

However, all of this architectural evidence has now been reconsidered
as part of the larger debate concerning the nature of David and
Solomon, and it has been suggested, by Finkelstein and others, that
these constructions may not date to the reign of Solomon but may
instead have been built by a ruler who came after their time, such as
Ahab, Omri, or Jeroboam, or even by different rulers in Israel and
Judah. The arguments used by these archaeologists can be reiterated
in fairly short order, albeit at the risk of possibly simplifying
their positions too much.

Finkelstein’s proposed re-dating of these structures comes not
only from a suggested reexamination of the relevant pottery and
architecture, but from radiocarbon dates that have recently become
available. Measuring radiocarbon, or C14, as it is known in the
literature, is a process invented by the American chemist and Nobel
Prize–winner Willard Libby in 1949. It has proven increasingly
useful to archaeologists ever since and is one of the major
technological advances to have affected biblical archaeology since
1950. It provides archaeologists with a date when specific
organisms—whether humans, trees, plants, or animals—died
or stopped growing, by measuring the amount of C14 still present in
the excavated remains. It therefore suggests a date for the
stratigraphical level or context at a site in which such remains are
found. However, it cannot give a precise date (e.g., 1005 BCE);
rather, it provides a statistical probability that the date falls
within a given range of years (e.g., 1005 BCE +/- 15 years = 1020–990
BCE).

When excavating in and around the six-chambered gate at Megiddo, both
the original Chicago excavators and then later Yadin identified the
pottery that they found there as belonging to the tenth century BCE.
When similar pottery was subsequently found at other sites by other
archaeologists, those archaeologists used it to identify the tenth
century levels at their excavations. However, the Chicago excavators,
as well as Yadin, were working before the days of C14 and their
dating of the pottery in the gate was based solely upon the belief
that Solomon built the gate, which in turn was based upon the two
passages in the Bible from 1 Kings. While this might well be correct,
such an assumption needs to be corroborated by other means, like
using radiocarbon dating on wood or bone fragments found with the
pottery in the gate. Why? For one thing, they were working backwards,
for they were dating the pottery on the basis of the architecture,
rather than dating the architecture by the pottery (which is the
proper way to do it, as we now know). What if the Bible is incorrect,
or we have misinterpreted either it or the remains that have been
found, and Solomon did not build these particular gates at Megiddo,
Hazor, and Gezer? In that case, the pottery found within the gate
could very well date to some other time period, not necessarily the
tenth century BCE. In other words, inherent assumptions need to be
tested, rather than taken on faith, even (or especially) in biblical
archaeology.

In fact, Finkelstein argues that a later king is likely to have built
the gate at Megiddo, which would mean that it—and the pottery
within it—does not date to the tenth century. His belief is
based in part on newly-published radiocarbon dates, as mentioned
above, and in part on the fact that a palace at the site of Samaria,
which was built by the Omride dynasty to serve as their capital, and
a second palace at Megiddo (Palace 1723) both contain identical
masons’ marks on the building blocks. They are the only two
such buildings in all of Israel to have such identical marks. Since
the palace at Samaria dates to the time of Omri and Ahab in the ninth
century BCE, Palace 1723 at Megiddo probably does as well, which
means that Palace 6000 in the same level, as well as the hypothesized
casemate wall and the six-chambered gate, also all date to long after
Solomon.

If this is the case, then what we have long thought was tenth century
pottery is in fact not tenth century at all, but is instead later,
i.e. dating to the ninth or even eighth century—not only at
Megiddo but also at all other sites in Israel with similar pottery.
This would mean that not only do all of our assumptions about the
tenth century have to be reexamined, but also that Solomon, and
perhaps much of the tenth century itself, essentially disappears from
the archaeological and historical record that we currently possess.
It is in light of this possibility that one might better understand
the ongoing discussion concerning tenth-century Jerusalem mentioned
above, with scholars wondering just how large the city was during the
time of David and Solomon.

However, Amihai Mazar, a distinguished archaeologist from the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem (and first cousin once removed of Eilat
Mazar), takes the position that the traditional dating for David and
Solomon and for the city gates and casemate walls at Megiddo, Hazor,
and Gezer—in the tenth century BCE—is essentially
correct. He counters Finkelstein’s arguments with radiocarbon
dates from his own site of Tel Rehov, as well as other sites in
Israel, among other data. As a result of this ongoing debate, two
alternative versions of the archaeology and history of Israel from
this time period are now available, but the debate remains
unresolved, with the size and importance and correct dates of the
kingdoms of David and Solomon hanging in the balance.

So, did David and Solomon exist? It is fair to say that they most
likely did, at least if the Tel Dan Stele with its mention of a
Davidic dynasty (Beit David) is any indication. However, the
jury is still out as to how important they actually were, how large
their empires were, and whether the biblical traditions and stories
concerning the two men are essentially correct or were concocted
later, either in the time of Josiah in the seventh century BCE or
even after. Although David and Solomon have successfully overcome the
sabotaging nihilism of the 1990s and the early part of the new
millennium, the debates about them are still ongoing, with new
discoveries impacting the debate as well as benefiting biblical
archaeology as a whole.

For instance, Aren Maeir of Bar Ilan University, digging at the
Philistine city of Tel Safi/Gath in a level dating to the tenth or
ninth century BCE, found a pottery sherd that may have the ancient
equivalent of the name “Goliath” scratched on it.
Although the sherd (and the name) almost certainly did not belong to
David’s Goliath, if it does say “Goliath” then it
shows that there was such a personal name used in the region at
approximately the correct chronological period.

At Amihai Mazar’s site of Tel Rehov, in Israel’s Bet
She’an Valley, thirty beehives (forming an apiary or bee yard)
from the tenth or ninth century BCE were found. The beehives are the
earliest discovered anywhere in the ancient Near East and give new
meaning to the biblical phrase “land of milk and honey.”
The excavators had already begun to suspect that they were excavating
an apiary, so they decided to employ residue analysis—in which
the surface of an excavated vessel is scraped, or a small piece of it
is crushed, and a gas chromatography instrument and mass spectroscopy
are used to look for any organic materials that may indicate the type
of food that was once contained in the vessel. At Rehov, the residue
analysis indicated the presence of degraded beeswax in the vessels,
confirming the archaeologists’ suspicions that they were indeed
excavating an apiary.

At the site of Khirbet Qeiyafa (possibly ancient Sha’arayim),
Yossi Garfinkel of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem discovered a
pottery sherd probably dating to the tenth century BCE with five
inked lines of Hebrew, written using proto-Canaanite script, a
precursor of the Hebrew alphabet. The words “king,”
“judge,” and “slave” could be made out
immediately, but the rest of the inscription was so faded that
nothing more could be read by the naked eye. The ostracon was
subsequently flown to the United States, where Greg Bearman, formerly
of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute
of Technology, who has served as a pioneer in applying modern imaging
technology to archaeology, used a variety of high technology systems
in Massachusetts and California to take further images, including two
different imaging spectrometers (one that acquires the entire
reflectance spectrum of a line at once and the other that creates
both reflectance and fluorescence spectral images) and twelve-band
spectral imaging with higher spatial resolution than the previous two
methods. When all of the images have been analyzed, it should be
possible to read the entire inscription; if so, it may shed light on
the whole debate regarding David and Solomon, although the odds are
against it.

At Khirbat en-Nahas in Jordan, an ancient copper-production site,
biblical archaeologists Tom Levy of the University of California at
San Diego and Mohammad Najjar of Jordan’s Friends of
Archaeology have published evidence that the site contains industrial
smelting debris more than twenty feet deep. According to Levy, the
radiocarbon dates may date the site, located in the biblical kingdom
of Edom, to the tenth or ninth centuries BCE, some three hundred
years earlier than previously thought. If so, they could be related
to the famous copper mines of King Solomon, although definitive proof
remains to be found.

Clearly, there remains much to be discovered, and much to be excited
about, in the debate about David and Solomon in particular and in the
field of biblical archaeology as a whole. Although the discipline is
not a new field, having been seriously practiced for more than one
hundred years, it has kept pace with modern developments. At its
inception, the principal tools were the pick and shovel. Now biblical
archaeologists use magnetometers, ground penetrating radar, electric
resistivity meters, and satellite photography alongside traditional
methods of excavation, enabling them to peer beneath the ground
surface before physical excavation begins. Radiocarbon dating is used
alongside time-honored chronological methods such as pottery
seriation and typology. And biblical archaeologists are working hand
in hand with specialists in ceramic petrography, residue analysis,
and DNA analysis, in order to answer more anthropologically-oriented
questions concerning ethnicity, gender, trade, and the rise of
rulership and complex societies.

Sometimes these tools help to confirm the biblical text and sometimes
they do not. Upon occasion, the archaeologists can bring to life the
people, places, and events discussed in the Bible. But ultimately
biblical archaeology is not about proving or disproving the Bible, or
even determining whether David and Solomon existed. Instead, biblical
archaeologists are more concerned with investigating the material
culture of the lands and eras in question and reconstructing the
culture and history of the Holy Land for a period lasting more than
two thousand years. And that in itself is absolutely fascinating, for
professionals and the general public alike.